


i'll be so alone without you (maybe you'll be lonesome too)

by broikawa



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Anxiety, Bathrooms, Breakfast, Cooking, Couch Cuddles, Domestic Fluff, Drunken Kissing, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Flirting, Gentle Kissing, Hugs, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Internal Conflict, Internal Monologue, Intimacy, Late Night Conversations, Living Together, M/M, Movie Night, Moving In Together, Mutual Pining, Pining, Platonic Cuddling, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Reminiscing, Requited Love, Sexual Humor, Sharing a Bed, Showers, Slow Dancing, Smoking, Tenderness, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:59:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24124762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/broikawa/pseuds/broikawa
Summary: love (n.), the most imperfect thing in the worldor ;; richard is dense. francis is stressed. they're both very gay
Relationships: Francis Abernathy/Richard Papen
Comments: 27
Kudos: 171





	i'll be so alone without you (maybe you'll be lonesome too)

**Author's Note:**

> i started this 3 days after i finished tsh on a whim because i wanted to do a 1k writing session w ms. donna tartt's style and it got a little out of hand. enjoy

I’m not sure where to begin to explain this one.

I could start at the train station, where we had dropped off Camilla, where I had asked her to marry me, to which she refused and insisted she had to get back to her Grandmother. Looking back on it, I’m not quite sure why I was so insistent. Well, perhaps I do; I loved her, but thinking about it I’m not certain it was completely romantic love that I felt towards her. She was beautiful, undoubtedly, and that was a fact that anyone could reproduce if you asked them what they thought about her. I was quite enamoured by her, to say the least. I’m sure I would’ve been content marrying her if she had said yes. I still don’t know what my feelings are, exactly. They confuse me still, every time we talk.

I could start at the hospital, where I had visited Francis not too long before, where I had met his future spouse, Priscilla, to whom I felt a slight disdain towards the moment she entered the room. I didn’t notice it that day or even in the weeks following, but later, some odd months into my new situation, I realized it one night while laying in bed, sleep refusing to claim me. I still have yet to tell Francis about it, and while I’m sure he’d agree, I doubt I ever will. Some things are best left unsaid, and I’m not sure he would want to talk about her anyway.

I could start at Francis’ old apartment, years before, when we still all attended Hampden, when Julian was yet to suspect us for Bunny’s murder nor was getting packed up to leave us without a word and with a substitute for the rest of the year (whom I felt a slight disdain towards the moment he entered the room. I was quick to notice this one). I could start when he suggested we run away to Quebec. Though I gave him a firm answer of “no,” I had thought about it for a moment and considered it to be an option. Not so much because of the _running away_ part, nor the _Quebec_ part (not because I disliked it, as I had never been there, but I had read about it and it seemed quite pretty, and the streets I had seen in pictures looked quite European. Francis would’ve fit in quite nicely, I had thought.) It was more so the _with Francis_ part that had made me consider. It was easy for me to see that, in that moment, out of everyone, Francis was the easiest to spend time with. I liked Francis, and I liked talking to him, and it wasn’t to say that I didn’t like the others or that I didn’t like talking to them; I just felt safer, more comfortable, perhaps, spending my days with Francis. We worked, in a sense.

I could start at my room, weeks before, when we still all liked each other and could all be in one room without wanting to kill each other, when we were still trying to lie low until Bunny’s case blew over. When Francis had kissed me. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, and, in fact, I quite enjoyed it. His mouth felt different than the girls I had kissed and it was warm and soft and when he had pulled away I had wanted to kiss him again. It confused me for a great deal of time, even after I had told him I didn’t have feelings for him (though, that was more for me than it was him. I just wanted to give myself some piece of mind). The days following were increasingly stressful and I spent a few of them alcohol-full or medicated or both. Sometimes when substance wasn’t enough to dull my ever-running thoughts I moved on to other means of stress relief, and sometimes, when I moved on to other means of stress relief, I had Francis in mind. It wasn’t always purposeful, but occasionally I needed an additional something to distract me as I moved around and he was the only person that came to mind that I wouldn’t mind having distract me for real. (He doesn’t know about this yet either, though I wouldn’t be adverse to telling him if it ever came up, and it isn’t as if he doesn’t know about other instances of the same thing, anyway).

I could start in the hall where we first met, when he had asked me something that I didn’t understand until some ways into Latin class. Sometimes, later in the year, I would wonder if he could still be serious about it.

I could start where I am now. In New York, with Francis. I started staying with him a few weeks after our and Camilla’s visit had ended, and a few days after he had called to say that the wedding had been called off.

“What do you mean” I asked over the phone, “it’s called off?”

“I called it off,” he told me. “I do believe you told me not to marry her.” His voice was flat and dull.

I ignored him. “Why?”

“Why? Isn’t that obvious?”

It was obvious to anyone who had met Francis at all. “What about your inheritance?” I asked.

“I can’t handle this anymore, Richard,” he told me. His voice was strained, as if he hadn’t talked in a few hours. I heard him take another inhale of his cigarette. “I needed to get out.”

“You won’t have anything left, Francis, what are you going to do?”

“I have somewhere to stay for a while,” he assured me, “I’ll figure it out while I’m there.”

“I’m coming over there,” I said as if it were a five minute walk away.

He didn’t say anything for a moment. I heard him exhale, more of a sigh than a puff of smoke out his mouth. He was firm when he spoke. “Richard,” he said plainly.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“A place in New York.” He said it lazily, messily, as if he were throwing the words out. _He sounds tired_ , I inquired to myself, _how much sleep has he gotten?_

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I told him.

  
  


Francis and I met at a small diner a few blocks from his apartment. It was sometime in the late afternoon, the December sun reaching its final hours in the day. I was lucky to have known where it was – I had done a lot of exploring during the summer when I stayed in Brooklyn and had come to the diner a couple of times out of curiosity. I remember one night, late, when I had come after a night out. I ordered a coffee and an omelette, practically inhaling my eggs and leaving my coffee out to cool, and sat in my booth in my drunken state for two hours. I downed my cold coffee once I had gotten up, then paid the bill and went back to my apartment to sleep for 12 hours.

He was already sitting in a booth when I arrived. The bags under his eyes stood out like dark stones in a snowbank, and his hair was long enough to cover his eyes when he looked down at the table. His cheeks sunk in a little, too. They looked better than they did when he was in the hospital, though I had seen him better than what he was. Still, he was dressed as one would expect him; black turtleneck, beige trenchcoat that he laid over his side of the booth, grey dress trousers, and old Dr. Martens oxfords, laced up neatly and double knotted. His glasses were different from when I had last seen him. He had one elbow on the table and his chin in the palm of his hand. I sat down across from him.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he said. His voice was reminiscent of what it was like over the phone. He was quiet again immediately.

Neither of us were ones for small talk, but I tried, “How are you doing?” anyway.

He said, “All right, I suppose.” He put his arm down on the table. He asked with slight brush-off, “ _Et toi_?”

“Fine,” I said, which was not a lie. I looked down at the table, knowing what I wanted to ask but unsure if I should.

“I know what you’re going to ask,” he said for me. “And, yes, I really did call it off.”

“I’m sure that went well,” I tried, but his expression stayed the same; dull and weary and grey. “Are you okay?”

“I’m getting by,” he said.

I opened my mouth to say something, but a waitress came by our table before I could. “Can I get you anything?” she asked me, staring like she was expecting an answer.

“Just a coffee, please,” I said.

She scribbled on her notepad. “I’ll be right out with that, and –” she looked to Francis – “with your tea.”

“Thank you,” he said politely. Even then, Francis’ ability to switch fronts so easily surprised me. He went right back as she walked away.

“What was it like,” I asked him, “living with her?”

He scoffed, “Dreadful, honestly. Like I told you, she was constantly on my toes all the time, always trying to make me feel better, even if I was fine. She never even bothered to ask if I needed anything in the first place. She just did things for me and assumed I’d be appreciative. And she hated that I smoked. She’d take cigarettes out of my hand and put them out, always saying I’d stink up the house. It was one of the only releases I had from everything. She was a constant drag and it was suffocating, you know? I started taking them with me into the shower eventually. It was the only time I could be alone.

“We had… done things together, occasionally, but it was always her that asked. I don’t know why she continued to ask; she always complained that I wasn’t enjoying it or asked why I couldn’t get it up – even though she knew why, so, really, her complaining was just counterproductive – and it’d just end in me getting out of bed once she’d fallen asleep and lighting a cigarette and finding something to drink and passing out on the couch an hour later. That, or I’d leave and hide out at some late-night place until morning.”

“I’m sorry,” I said lamely.

“It’s fine,” he said, “I’m out of it now. And it wasn’t like this all the time – I left the house as much as I could, and she was usually busy with wedding planning that I didn’t see her all day some days. I think, though, that she tried to make herself believe that I loved her.”

His eyes were cast down at the table, and his mouth and nose were nearly pulled into a scowl, a look of disgust. I changed the subject. “Where are you living again?”

“I have an apartment a little bit away from here,” he told me. “It’s not terribly small and the price is low enough for me to be all right there for a few months.”

I had never imagined I’d hear the words “the price is low enough for me” come out of Francis’s mouth. “Do you like it?” I asked. “The apartment?”

“It’s too quiet,” he told me, eyes down.

“How do you mean?” I inquired.

“I mean…” he said, “I like living alone. It’s better than having someone breathing down my neck all day. It really was exhausting. I needed space sometimes and she just didn’t listen.” He paused. “She was a reminder of what I was giving up.”

“That you’re...” I started, but stopped, timid.

“Yes, Richard, that I’m gay,” he said. “It’s not a bad word. Not that you have an aversion to those.”

I ignored his comment about my language. “What makes it feel quiet?”

“It feels… I don’t know, lonely sometimes, I guess? I’ve got nothing to do without work or money and I sit around smoking and watching bad TV and being sad.” The waitress brought over a small teapot. “Thank you,” he said, taking it and placing the tea bag inside. She gave me my coffee, I gave her a nod.

“So you called it off just like that?” I asked. I took a sip of my coffee, nearly burning my tongue.

“Yes,” he said, “and when I told her, she acted as if she was expecting it.”

“I’m sorry.”

He chuckled. “The best part is what she said to me,” he told me. “Said she ‘didn’t want to marry a homosexual anyway’, that she ‘didn’t want to give her future children an automatic spot in hell’.”

“Francis…” I said in shock, not sure what to say.

“I mean, do you see why I tried so hard to die?” he asked, voice growing louder. His eyes were wide, held open as if he were disgusted by his own tone. He exhaled and sat back. “I’m sorry,” he said, much quieter.

I was frank with him. “You look tired.”

“I’m exhausted,” he said, taking a sip of his tea.

“Was it that hard?” I asked him innocently.

“Was what hard?”

“Hiding.”

“Of course it was.”

“How so?”

Francis looked down at his cup, holding it absentmindedly. “Richard,” he said, head down but eyes looking up at me, “what would you do if you had to hide the fact that your name was Richard?”

I looked at him, lost. “What do you mean?”

He put the drink down. “Lets say your name is Richard, but you can’t let anyone know your name is Richard, so you tell people your name is, I don’t know–” he waved his hands around, thinking– “John or something. Everyone calls you John, knows you as John. But you’re actually Richard, and you know you’re Richard, and you’re tired of everyone calling you John. You want to be known as Richard. But you can’t. What do you do?”

I found anywhere but Francis to be a good place to put my eyes. “I don’t know,” I told him. “Can’t I just say I’m Richard?”

“Richard,” he folded his hands together, “don’t you get it yet? I want to be myself just as much as you do in this scenario.”

It clicked, finally, in my mind when he had said that. “Oh,” I said simply.

“I can’t just go my whole life hiding who I am,” he said. “Not when I’ve been doing that most of my life already.” His hands moved down to his lap and he slouched against the seat. “You are so dense sometimes.”

We were both quiet for a long while. Francis took an occasional sip of his tea, and I did the same with my coffee. I had waved the waitress off when she had come over to see if we wanted anything else, though I called her back when we both agreed that getting the bill and leaving was a good idea. We didn’t say much during the taxi ride to his apartment either. I looked out the window at the familiar-but-not-familiar-enough streets of New York, noting the many shops and people and cars and lights, and the noises that flooded each crevice of my ears, and the buildings that seemed to go all the way up past the clouds. I had had the dream, once, that everyone has at least once in their life of living in New York. The constant moving and work and change in dynamics had attracted me and I thought, perhaps, I would fit in. It was not a place I had ever seen Francis in; he was slower than the city and always seemed to fit in better in my head in more European settings. Though, perhaps not, because in the time he had been there, he had learned the social norms and the customs and what you should and shouldn’t do. He flowed out the door of the diner and onto the street and into the taxi with the poise of a New Yorker who had functioned there their whole life.

When we arrived at his building, Francis greeted the doorman with a kind smile. He lived on a floor in the centre of the building in an apartment similarly sized to the one he had during school. I entered into a hallway, with a bathroom and a closet on the left. At the end of the hall was another door, which I assumed was the bedroom. On the right was an open doorway into the living room, with a couch and a loveseat and a fireplace that I wondered if worked and a small TV and a small shelf covered with books and knick-knacks and liquor and an electric fan that was left unplugged. On the far side of the living room was another opening that led to the kitchen. The colours were dulled, but not bland, and the windows were big. It was neat enough, though the shoes by the door laid unkempt and there were some mugs and a plate on the coffee table and the throw pillows of the couch were on the floor. When I looked in the kitchen, there were more dishes sitting on the counter. It reminded me of Francis, in a way; composed at first glance, the smell of tobacco lingering in every room, obvious disorder if you looked just a little harder than a glance, the colours bright but quiet, and there was something inexplicably queer about it.

Francis threw his coat over the arm of the couch. “Would you like anything?” he asked, walking to the kitchen. I realized then that we hadn’t had anything to eat at the diner, and I hadn’t eaten since I was on my flight hours earlier. He called from the other room, “I think I’ve got leftovers, if you don’t mind that.” It was odd to think of Francis eating microwaved day-old take-out, but I was too hungry to care and accepted the offer.

“Thank you,” I said when he came back into the room with the food.

“Mhm,” he hummed, going over to his coat to dig around in the pocket for another cigarette. Getting comfortable on the loveseat he lit it, taking in a sharp inhale of smoke and letting it out the corner of his mouth. He held the cigarette delicately between his pointer and middle fingers. His hands were thin and his fingers were long and they were pretty like a girl’s. You could see his bones and veins through his skin, sharp and skeletal and blue. His wrists were thin, too, and looked fragile. The bone on the outer side of his wrist was visible when he held a cigarette or a glass, and when his hand was positioned a certain way, the artery in his wrist jutted out dangerously as if trying to burst through the pale skin covering it. No wonder he was hospitalized so easily. My eyes followed the cigarette as he brought it back up to his lips and inhaled. I felt something in my hips.

I couldn’t deny anything I thought about Francis, even if some of it was doused in liquor and drugs. I suppose we were all a little in love with each other in one way or another, though I imagined, in regards to myself, that it was only infatuation or appreciation or awe. Francis, for a reason I did not know, was different from the rest. Everyone was unique and their own person. But Francis – he was charming and whimsy and peculiar. He was a word between handsome and pretty, though I’m not entirely sure what it was. Perhaps enticing or alluring or ravishing or fair, but none of those seem quite right either. Francis, really, was just _Francis_ . In all the time that I had known him, I had thought it easy for everyone around him to fall for him. How could they not, I wondered. But why, I wondered also, was he so alone? It _was_ easy, right? It wasn’t just me? Only later I realized it was the other way around; it was easy for Francis to fall for those around him. He was a romantic and an idealist and saw the good in people, even if or when they had done the worst (Henry was a prime example of this as even after committing two murders, Francis trusted him still, though I can’t entirely blame him, seeing as I had done the same thing). He had dealt with more than he deserved to, and was so lost and damaged that he clung onto anyone who would give him positive attention, even for a night. It made you feel sorry for him, in a way. Perhaps I mistook that for attraction. This is why it had confused me why he had called off the wedding; he had said it himself, Priscilla was a nice girl, so perhaps, rather than clinging onto _anyone_ who would give him positive attention, it only ever worked with men.

I thought about what he had said in the diner as we ate, about hiding and finding it to be more difficult than I could imagine. It was no secret to myself that I also, on occasion, found myself attracted to men and I had even tried dating some months ago a man who I had met one night at a small bar after working all day with no luck, and though I didn’t mention it to him, he surely must have known I wasn’t entirely heterosexual. Perhaps he did know, but he assumed I didn’t really know what hiding was like because I liked women as well and therefore could hide much easier while still being myself. It wasn’t too outrageous of an assumption to make. That, or he was simply being emotional. At the very least, I understood his point, regardless of whether or not he understood me.

Later that night, he asked me if I had anywhere to stay.

“Oh,” I said, realizing I had not booked any hotels before I left, “I guess not.”

Lying on the loveseat still, he tapped his current cigarette out onto the carpet. “You can stay here then,” he said, and got up, “I’ll get you a blanket.”

  
  


I woke the next morning to clattering from the other room. The sun came in through the windows, giving the curtains no use. I looked around for a clock to see the time, but I couldn’t find one. I sat up, finding that my blanket had fallen to the floor some time in the night. My back wasn’t as sore as I expected sleeping on a futon – which Francis helped me put back into a couch after breakfast – to make it, though. Peering in the kitchen, I found Francis at the stove.

“Good morning,” I said. He jumped when I spoke.

“Goodness, Richard,” he said, looking at me, “don’t do that.”

I came in properly to see what he was doing. “I didn’t mean to.” In a pan were two fried eggs, and he seemed to have put bread in the toaster. “Are you making me breakfast?” I asked, slightly amused at the gesture.

“I do have some decency for guests,” he said, flipping one of the eggs. He motioned over to the dining table. “Go sit.”

I sat. I watched him. I had seen him a few times just after he’d woken up, and this time was no different. His hair had been pushed around by his pillow in his sleep, resulting in cowlicks all around his head. He was wearing a too big T-shirt and old-looking pyjama pants and slippers on his feet. He looked plain, to put it simply, and though it was odd to see him in such a state it wasn’t a bad look. The amount of casualness between us was enough to make my face warm. When he was done preparing our breakfast, he shuffled to the table with two plates and sat down across from me and we ate in silence for a few minutes before I asked, “What are you doing today?”

“Don’t know yet,” he said. “Anything you have in mind? It is your trip.”

I hadn’t really thought of the visit as a “trip,” rather a last-minute visit of concern. “You’re the expert here,” I said, and he nodded.

“I suppose.” He scooped up the last of his egg onto this fork and ate it. “There is this shop I’ve been meaning to check out, if you’d like to join me,” he suggested. 

“Sure,” I said, and finished my breakfast. Francis took my plate from me and put it in the sink.

He walked in the living room, tidying up the mess I had created unintentionally. “If you want to take a shower, feel free to.”

So, I did. The bathroom was small; there was a toilet on the right, then a sink and a mirror and medicine cabinet, then a bathtub and shower head. The shower curtain didn’t seem like something Francis would pick out – a simple, plastic-like, pale peach sheet – but I noticed in the less-than-24 hours of being with him that he was much different than I had remembered him and figured that maybe he had. The tiles on the floor were plain, white squares that ran halfway up the walls and changed into another plain, white surface, but the yellow of the ceiling light made them look an off-white eggshell colour. I locked the door, putting my clothes for afterwards on the closed toilet seat, shed the ones I was wearing, and stepped into the tub. It took me a moment to figure out how to get the shower head working, and I felt vulnerable and overexposed standing in Francis’s bathroom, naked and cold and confused. I got it working, much to my delight, and stood there for a moment, letting myself soak in the hot water. I had showered two nights before, before I left for New York, and the entire day yesterday I felt the travel exhaustion and airplane smell on me. These along with the germs from the airport and my body’s shock from being away from California, washed down the drain, and I felt myself become much lighter.

I picked up the shampoo bottle; _Birch Bark Extract_ , it read on the front. I looked down at the conditioner and it said the same thing. I wondered if Francis had concentrated the little money he had into his grooming products as I squeezed the soap out onto my hand. It smelled like him, naturally, and it was at this point that I really felt vulnerable, like I was invading his personal space or getting too cozy with him. Staying at someone’s apartment seemed normal, and using their shower did as well, but there was something different about using their soap that I couldn’t put my finger on. I shook my head, taking myself away from my thoughts and continuing to scrub at my hair. When I got to the body wash, I saw that he had two: lilac and honey, and pomegranate. My eyes drifted to the loofa hanging off the small shower caddy and my cheeks warmed, overwhelmed. I opted to use my hands instead, ultimately doing much less of a job than the loofa would have but saving me from consistent bashfulness.

I climbed out and got dressed, giving my hair a once-over in the mirror. Despite my discomposure from the self-constructed intimacy from the experience, I felt clean, and better than I had the day before. When I stepped out into the rest of the apartment, Francis wasn’t in sight, but I heard a drawer close from inside his bedroom. He heard me close the bathroom door, I assumed, because when I turned back he was peeking out at me. He had a knit sweater and a button-down underneath and grey dress pants, but the shirt was still untucked.

“Are you finished?” he asked, and I told him I was. “I can take your towel.” He outstretched his arm and I gave it to him, nearly dropping my other clothes in the process. He went back into the room but left the door open. I hoped my cheeks weren’t still red.

“Maybe put on a coat,” he said from the other room, “it looks a little cold out.”

I grabbed the one I had come in, putting it on as he came out of the room.

He moved past me to his shoes, putting a hand on my shoulder to balance himself as he put them on. “You smell nice,” he commented, smiling at his lame attempt at a joke.

My cheeks went red again.

It was, indeed, cold out. It was colder than I had expected it to be, and the coat that I brought with me did not give me much defence from it.

“Do you need my scarf, Richard?” Francis asked as we walked, “You look like you’re freezing to death.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m all right.” A lie, as I had not yet gotten used to the cold of New York after being in California for so long, but it didn’t matter; he’d said we’d be there soon not even a few minutes before. “Where’d you hear about this again?” I asked to direct the conversation off of my dropping body temperature.

“In a cafe not too far from here,” he said. “The barista mentioned it. It’s supposed to be cute.”

I wasn’t sure how a bookshop could be “cute” until we arrived. It was a small shop, with tables lined on the walls and one going down the middle, and another just outside the door with 50 cent and 1 dollar books. It looked like the sort of place a couple who were too in love with each other to notice anything around them besides one another would come to, or perhaps a penniless, novel-obsessed student at a nearby college, or perhaps an older woman with more than one cat. The door was held open with a small piece of wood, and when we entered, the man behind the counter – tall, warm skin, and short, black curls, wearing a sweater and only one earring – greeted us with half a smile. Francis split away from me to look at tables on one side of the store, so I looked on the other, and I browsed alone for a few minutes. I didn’t recognize most of the titles, and I picked up books based on the covers. I skimmed through synopses and had only selected one by the time that Francis came to find me again.

“Any luck?” he asked, two books in hand. I held up mine. “Lovely,” he said. He looked at the novels in front of us, and I found the book-hunting to be much more entertaining when he was beside me.

_I’d like to come back here_ , I thought, wondering how often new batches of books were put on display. I then wondered how long I was even going to be in the city. I’d booked a flight here as soon as I’d hung up on Francis. It wasn’t cheap but I didn’t care, as all I had my thoughts on was him and getting there. I hadn’t even thought about leaving until this point, and I still wasn’t sure when I was going to, as I felt no intention of leaving Francis here all alone with his thoughts, his situation, his anxiety. He seemed as if he were managing just fine but he’d said it himself just the day before that it was hard for him alone like this. He’d gone from engaged and comfortable (in terms of money, of course, as being engaged to Priscilla had made him anything but) to alone and lost in just a matter of days and had no plan, no idea what he was supposed to do next, and I felt much the same. I had a thought.

“Francis?” I said.

He kept his eyes on the new book he had in his hand. “Hm?”

“You mentioned yesterday…” I stopped, not sure how to phrase the question I was about to ask, “you said the apartment was quite lonely, right?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What if,” I paused carefully, “I stayed with you for a bit? You know, until you get your bearings together?”

He looked at me for a long moment, as if processing every conversation we’ve ever had. When he finally made a decision on what to say to me, he asked, “Don’t you have a flight back?”

“I haven’t booked it yet,” I said. “I didn’t know how long I’d be staying.”

Francis dropped his arms but kept the book in hand. He didn’t look at me. “You don’t have to say yes,” I told him, though he interrupted me.

“Sure,” he said. He said it quickly, as if ripping off a bandage.

“All right,” I said.

“All right,” he said. “What about your things?” he asked, as if he hadn’t just said yes to me.

“I’ll be okay for a while,” I assured him.

He let out a breath. “You can’t just pack up and move to New York on a whim,” he tried. His eyebrows were furrowed together and I could tell he was clenching his jaw. Despite his delicate features, he looked frustrated with me.

I shook my head. “It’s all right,” I said again, “I’ll be fine. I work from home anyway, so it won’t be much different. I’ll figure everything out; you don’t have to worry about any of it.”

He sighed. “All right,” he said again, expression still crumpled, and we said nothing to each other for the rest of the outing.

  
  


With that, we lived together.

Adjusting to it took a while.

Much of the first few weeks felt as if we were simply living in the same space, not sharing it or living together. I went about my business and he went about his. We would typically share a meal throughout the day, and we would sit together at the table without a word. He luckily had a computer already, eliminating the anxiety over trying to get one, so I could work. I went out when I pleased and he did the same, though I preferred day trips through the city while he more frequently took nights out for himself. Some days we would see each other at breakfast before seeing each other again late at night when he returned.

Our habits regarding most things were quite different, and sometimes that worked to our benefit and sometimes it did not. He preferred the quiet during the day – would rather have the windows open to hear the noises of the public outside – while I enjoyed having the television on for background noise. Dirty dish piles in the sink became my worst enemy, though Francis didn’t mind giving the least effort possible when cleaning up after a meal. He did prefer our shoes at the door to be in order, a pet peeve I didn’t care to pick up but tried to respect nonetheless. At least we showered at different times.

There was something nice about living with someone, though, and my days stopped blending together as they had when I was in the west. Francis must have felt this, too, as his mood seemed to get better with every day that I was there. He made more of an effort to keep the place clean, though whether a formality or genuine effort, I didn’t know at first. The dishes were done and the shoes were in order and, soon enough, he expected me to keep the place in its new state of cleanliness. I could tell he was still a bit apprehensive about the whole thing still, but he never said anything negative about me being there and never asked me to leave, so I didn’t.

It was safe to say that I was getting comfortable.

My habit of waking in the night, one that I had had for years and didn’t see leaving me any time soon, continued to plague me, and on one night in particular when it struck, the apartment seemed quieter than usual, somehow. At first I had thought it early in the night but upon inspection of a clock I found that it was nearly three. My back felt stiff and a single movement had caused my hip to come into place so I got up and padded into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. The tiles of the kitchen were cold against my feet. I drank one in a few seconds and had another, and another after that until my late-night dehydration was quenched.

I returned to the living room and sat on what was now my bed once again but I found an urge in myself to check in on Francis. He had gone out somewhere earlier that evening – where, he didn’t tell me, and when I had asked before he left he’d simply told me he’d be back later – and I had fallen asleep before he had returned. Thus far, he’d always returned just after midnight at the latest, so to be out three hours past his usual self-imposed, unspoken curfew was much more than odd.

Carefully, I knocked on his bedroom door but received no answer, so I knocked again before going ahead and opening the door myself. He was not in his bed.

“Francis?” I called out though I knew it was pathetic as I said it. I went to the bathroom but he wasn’t there either, and that’s when I noticed the shoes that he had worn to go out had not been put back at the front entrance yet. This concerned me, obviously, because it was very late, much too late for someone to be wandering the streets alone and well in the possibility of danger, so I grabbed my own shoes, not quite sure what I was doing, and left out the door.

In the elevator down, I tapped my foot nervously, and began pacing.

I was anxious. I mean, of course I was. Francis wasn’t home, nowhere to be seen, and I didn’t even know where he had gone in the first place, so it wasn’t like I could call up whatever bar or club he had gone to and asked anyone if a tall, ginger, possibly drunk man had been in the establishment and if he had left yet. That would’ve been a whole other set of problems, but I would’ve much rather had to deal with those than the ones I had before me.

Once the elevator doors opened, I walked into the building lobby at a pace much faster than my normal one and walked to the front door. I approached the doorman, presumably looking slightly crazed and damp with sleep. “Excuse me,” I said.

“Hello,” he said to me. “Mr. Abernathy’s friend, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am. Has he come back yet?”

“Afraid not,” he told me, and my panic set back in. “Had he mentioned when he was going to be back?”

“I don’t think so, no. Did he happen to say where he was going?”

“No, he didn’t,” he said, and my panic set in further.

“All right,” I said, dejected, “thank you.” He nodded at me as I went back inside. Bitterly, I pressed the button on the elevator to take me back up to the apartment and, considering the late hour that it was, it was not busy, so it opened right away.

I reached the floor, wondering what I was supposed to do next, I realized I had run out without hesitation, not bothering to put on a coat or proper clothes. At least I had been wearing pants and saved myself the embarrassment of being caught in my underwear. Wandering the halls of the building in my pyjamas and a t-shirt gave me a weird feeling and quickened my pace to get back to the apartment.

Upon entering, I took my shoes off hastily, kicking them out of the way in a way that I was sure Francis was not going to approve of once he finally returned. His were still not returned to their spot. Before I could reach the living room to try to go back to sleep – despite the fact that I was quite certain that I wasn’t going to be able to, and that I would lie on the futon with my eyes on the door as if, by sheer will, my staring would get him to come back – I heard shoe-covered footsteps from the kitchen. I froze, my body going cold, and wondered if Francis was going to be coming home to the sight of my bloodied and very deceased body on the floor of his living room. He didn’t need to see another person dead, and he didn’t need to lose another friend. _He’d probably complain about the stained carpet in the process_ , I said to myself, nearly giving my location away with a snicker. I focused back on the noise coming from the other side of the flat.

Carefully, I peeked around the corner to see who was in the apartment. I stepped out at the sight.

“Francis,” I said.

“Hello,” he said, turning around.

I looked at him, confused, concerned, and slightly irritated, though the last one I wasn’t sure why. “Where were you?”

“I told you I was going out, did I not?”

“Yes, but–” I stopped, not knowing what to say to him. I wasn’t exactly sure how I was feeling – worry, annoyance, fear. I wasn’t exactly sure how to tell him this, either, so I kept my mouth shut and ran a hand through my hair.

“I assure you, Richard, I’ve stayed out much later than this before.” He continued into the living room and I followed.

“I just talked to the doorman,” I said, “and he said you hadn’t come back.”

“I came in the back,” he said, yawning. “It was faster.”

He didn’t seem drunk, or at the very least, consumed by alcohol. Too full of emotion to do anything else, I held my gaze on the carpet under my feet.

“Were you worried about me?” he asked, expression quizzical, a twinge of amusement in his tone.

“Of course I was worried,” I told him. I sat, my hands folded together. I couldn’t look at him. I tried to but my eyes dragged themselves away before he could look back.

He sighed, finally taking off his coat. “Well, you don’t need to get so worked up about it. I _can_ take care of myself.”

“I’m aware.”

“I’m going to bed.”

“All right.”

“Goodnight, Richard,” he said, quieter. Softer, even.

“Goodnight.” I didn’t look up as I spoke.

  
  


We did get better eventually.

Francis could be considered somewhat of an impulsive individual, and I knew this, and yet what surprised me about him was his ability to change his mind in about three seconds flat.

“You know what,” Francis said, turning away from the front door, with his shoes already on and being completely ready to leave. “I don’t feel like going out.”

I turned, craning my neck to look at him from the couch. “You just spent half an hour getting ready.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. He kicked off his shoes and shed his coat, leaving both on the floor, an odd gesture for him, so I could tell he was most definitely being serious. He sat next to me on the couch and I felt severely underdressed, as I did often with him, myself in pyjamas and him in a whole get-up, his nice slacks and all.

“What do you want to do instead?” I asked, looking innocently at him.

He was quiet, twiddling his thumbs. He sat with his socked feet on the floor but leaned back lazily on the couch. I had seen this side of him quite a lot since moving in, his casual posture and hunched shoulders when he lounged in the living room. There was something about it that made his usual poise somewhat performance-like, as if it were an act to make everyone around him feel in the presence of someone important. I now knew the truth, and I liked it. I liked it quite a lot, in fact.

I wasn’t sure what I had thought he was going to say, but he responded in a way I was not expecting. “Do you want to find a movie?” he asked quietly. “On TV, I mean?”

I considered it, then nodded. He reached for the remote control on the coffee table, turning it on. “There has to be something we could find,” he muttered, more to himself than me, and I watched him flick through the channels.

We found one eventually, an older movie from the ‘70s playing on a random channel. It was 8:18, and the movie didn’t start until 8:30, so we settled in while we waited. Francis changed out of his clothes and into more comfortable attire, grabbing a blanket for himself while in the bedroom, and I scoured the kitchen to find something for us to snack on while we watched. We had fallen into the habit of buying snack food when we went down to the supermarket, whether it be potato chips or chocolates or what have you, and while it might not have been the healthiest purchases, it made us happy, and that was the excuse we went with every time we looked at each other and silently asked if we were buying it (it was almost always a yes). We had bought microwave popcorn during the visit before last, so I put it in the microwave and waited and heard Francis come out of his bedroom as I came back to the living room with it.

We sat on either side of the couch.

As it went on, we gradually sat closer to each other. Francis put his legs up not even twenty minutes in, his feet resting in my lap. I tensed up at first, surprised by the sudden contact, then relaxed as I noticed he wasn’t even paying attention to me, but too interested in what was going on on the screen.

Later, during a commercial break, he got up to use the bathroom, and upon returning sat in the middle of the couch without so much as a glance towards me.

Eventually, nearing the end of the film, we had both grown tired. I leaned back against the couch, legs drawn up under me. Francis, however, had a different approach to his ever growing drowsiness, shuffling over to me and resting his head on my shoulder. He yawned.

I wasn’t sure what to say, or even if I was supposed to say anything at all. “Did you want to go to bed?” I tried.

“Hush,” he responded, obviously intrigued by the plot and not wanting to miss a second.

I quieted myself, trying to relax, but the weight of him leaning on me felt much bigger than it actually was. It wasn’t just his weight but my feelings, my ever growing, overtaking, obvious-to-everyone-but-me feelings. They followed me everyday, every time I helped him with something, every time we talked into the late hours of the night, every time I laid eyes on him. I looked down at him on my shoulder, _really_ looked at him – the mess on his head that he considered hair (a mess that would soon be in desperate need for a haircut, I noted), the concentrated look on his face as the movie’s plot engrossed him further, the way he’d lick the salt off his fingers every time he ate more of the popcorn – and considered the fact that I was most definitely and very quickly falling in love with him.

  
  
  


The bathroom was a place in which we were much more ourselves. I hadn’t grown up with siblings, and I hadn’t a roommate during college, so I had never had to share a bathroom with someone until I lived with him. It was an odd sort of intimacy that I still think about everyday, but I have no complaints about it except for the fact that he has a tendency to leave his toothbrush on the sink when he could very well put it in the medicine cabinet where it belonged.

A night routine had been established quite quickly with no fuss. If we were going to bed at the same time, one of us would tidy up while the other washed himself up, and when he was done we would switch. We did, inevitably get lazy some nights and shared the small sink as we brushed our teeth together, and not even the lack of room to spit was enough for me to dislike it.

He made a lot of use of the bathtub, a simple, porcelain-looking thing, and a decent size but much too small for Francis’ gangly body to fit in completely. His knees always poked out from the water and he often sat in a way that didn’t look comfortable but still he insisted every few nights to pour himself a glass of wine and light his heavily-scented candles (he was lucky I didn’t mind the smell of sandalwood – the whole apartment would smell of it even hours after his bath) and add in his salts or his bubbles or both and soak for an hour. Often he would bathe while I made myself dinner, and occasionally I would join him in the bathroom and I would sit on the tiles and eat and we would talk. Sometimes he would have an extra glass for me set out just in case I sat with him. Sometimes we wouldn’t talk at all, but I would still sit with him, eating whatever I had decided to have that night, and we would enjoy each other's company.

I preferred to shower – I always found them more energizing and a better reset for me than baths ever had – and mostly did so in the morning when I woke up. There were nights when I would have one before bed, but for the most part I stuck to my schedule of wake up, shower, breakfast, get going, and it worked well for me. Francis, if he were up, and it wasn’t often as he’d taken a liking to sleeping in, sometimes made breakfast for the two of us. It was always a pleasant surprise to come out of the bathroom to find food waiting for me on the table. It felt like our own way of saying _thank you_ or _I appreciate you_ or perhaps another three words that I thought of almost everyday but always left unsaid.

He did join me in the shower, once.

It was after dinner – we had just eaten and Francis had taken up the task of cleaning up, so I took the opportunity to wash up before bed and decided to shower. I had left the door unlocked, which I never would have done just six months before. Even when I lived alone I locked the bathroom door when I bathed, but I found no reason to with Francis. I trusted him. I undressed myself, pushing my clothes against the wall in a small clump, turning on the water and climbing in.

I let the water run over me a moment, and not more than half a minute after I had gotten in I heard the door creak open. I waited for Francis to say something – ask if I wanted to find a movie to watch after I got out, or ask where something was, or press that I wasn’t allowed to use too much hot water as he wanted to bathe after I was finished – but he was silent, and closed the door behind him. I didn’t say anything, a little shocked, a slight bit curious, but remaining unworried. I heard clothing drop to the floor – his robe, I guessed, the one that he had bought while we were out on a shopping trip one day not too long before. Another small thump to the floor suggested that he had taken off his underwear. A second later, he pulled back the curtain, just enough to let himself in.

He came behind me, his chest pressed to my back, and his hands travelled over my shoulders and down my arms and across my hips until they settled folded together over my stomach. I felt him against me, reluctant and halfway stiff. The rest of him was soft, supple, though the bones of his hips poked against my back, and he leaned against me, letting go of himself like he had wanted this for a while because he had. He put his lips against the back of my neck but he didn’t kiss me – just simply kept his mouth against my skin. And we stayed like this for a while. I thought, as the water poured over my body, about moving or talking or telling him to push or kiss or touch me, about asking him what he was doing, but I didn’t. I knew I could undo him with nothing more than an adjustment of my stance and we would fall into a new sort of rhythm but I kept still, not wanting to disturb the peace. Some things, though perhaps unbelievable so, were perfect as they were and this was one of them. An intimacy so simple that even the most complex beings quiver at the sight of it. We weren’t us but rather two bodies, standing together, touching, under the gentle flow of water. It felt as if no one else existed in that moment, and that life outside of the bathroom had halted just for us. With the curtain closed the light wasn’t able to join us, but the whole room glowed a deep, dim yellow.

We fit together so nicely, my back to his chest, his hips against me, me against his pelvis, that it felt as if we were meant to. His thumb slid over the scar from my old gunshot wound lightly, brushing over the skin soothingly, concerningly, the same way a lover may have done if it were still fresh and not years old. An apology, almost, for not giving it so much as a second of attention or worry in the first few minutes of me getting it. _I’m sorry_ , the touch said, _that I was so careless, that I was so focused on everything else in the room – the gun and the shouting and Henry and the blood – that I forgot about you_.

Eventually, I had relaxed completely, my body free of any stress or woe that I had ever felt. I relaxed against him, carefully at first, but I remembered that he wanted this too and let go of any expectation of judgements I had been feeling. He exhaled, the breath soft and made of pure contentment. We leaned against each other, warm and serene.

It was after this that I had decided I didn’t want to go back to California, didn’t want to leave New York, didn’t want to leave him. The whole experience was one of somewhat of a seductive bliss and gave me the same high that one often gets after finishing for even a while after we got out. Really, it was jarring, though made of a gentle lust and a sort of soft ecstasy. I wasn’t expecting him to do anything like this but I wasn’t completely taken aback, either. We had shared looks and touches, along with the occasional hand hold or kiss on the cheek to say hello, but they had all been formalities, platonic actions with romantic undertones. I hadn’t wanted to put too much thought into my feelings considering the temporality of our situation, but everything changed after the shower, and I finally began to get a grasp on what both Francis and myself wanted from each other. I didn’t want to leave, and I was quite certain he didn’t want me to either.

  
  


There was, soon, an unspoken set of rules placed over the apartment.

Rule 1: Always turn on the coffee pot or the kettle in the morning.

Rule 2: Take your shoes off at the door as soon as you come in.

Rule 3: Do not talk about the shower.

(I had my own internal set of rules such as, “Remember to put the bed back up in the morning,” and, “Do not even think about what you did that one night.”)

These rules (including my own) were to be followed at all times and were to be left unspoken at all times and both Francis and I had been very, very good at this so far. It wasn’t that we regretted what had happened in the shower but it felt more like if we talked about it, its euphoria, its pleasure would be gone. We also had, in addition to these rules, something that was less so a rule and more so a routine of me joining him in his bedroom after dinner, and while saying that I feel as if I’m subjecting myself to personal exposure, I cannot deny that intimate experiences had not been shared, though they never happened until a few weeks later. Usually, we would simply talk (but, again, never about the shower). It varied in length – sometimes ten minutes and sometimes a few hours, lasting long into the night – and I had fallen asleep next to him more than once.

This instance began no different.

I was lying on his bed with him, on top of the sheets. He had gone through a cigarette and was on his second one quite soon after. Neither one of us wore shirts, but Francis had on his bathrobe and his boxers, and I was in a pair of cotton pyjama bottoms, also Francis’s. I was lying on my back while he was on his side, his left arm holding him up and his right arm held lazily, cigarette in hand. The window on the other side of the room was open, airing it out, and the only light in the room was from the street lamps outside and the moon. How we had ended up on our particular topic of conversation, I’ve forgotten, the memory lost and overtaken by what had later taken place.

“Did you know,” Francis said, pausing to take a drag of his cigarette, “that an orgasm is called _la petite mort_ in French?”

“‘The little death’?” I translated.

“ _Oui_ , Richard,” he said, saying my name with an accent. “Of course, you could just call it _un orgasme_ , but _la petite mort_ is more…” He stopped to think, waving his hand around.

“Dramatic?” I filled in for him.

He gave me a look. “Striking,” he said. The corner of his mouth curled up, and mine couldn’t help but to follow. His eyes narrowed on mine as he brought the cigarette up to his lips again. When he was done, he passed it to me and I accepted. It had been a while since I’d smoked – while I had continued my drinking habits, much less than what it had been in school but still a substantial amount by the end of the week, I had quit smoking, and the only drugs I was taking were antidepressants and stimulants for my anxiety – so the drag I took was short, interrupted by my sputtering, and followed by a few deep coughs. I moved to lay on my side. Francis laughed at me.

“A forgotten skill,” he smirked, taking the cigarette back and showing me how it was done.

“I quit smoking a while ago,” I told him, shaking out one last cough. I laid my head on the pillow.

“I’m sure I’ll get you back up to speed eventually,” he teased, and I felt my cheeks warm. “Anywho, the French language is fascinating, hm?”

“I suppose. But it’s not Latin,” I said.

“True,” he said. “Maybe I’m just so used to French that I find it more enjoyable. Whatever the case, it’s entirely more interesting than English. Some words mean so much more. _La petite mort_ , again, for example, is a much better descriptor than an orgasm is.”

“How so?” I inquired.

“I know you’re not boring, Richard, so I know you know what one feels like –” my face reddened at his comment about my personal affairs – “and I also know you’re smart, so you know what I mean. It does feel a little bit like death of sorts; death of oneself before it and into a new one. A past and future in just one moment. The burst of pressure once it occurs, the release. It is a bit like death, when you think about it – everything builds up until it happens, and when it does it’s easy. There’s not much easier than death, you know. Though, I’m sure we’re both well aware of that.

“To die is simple, Richard, just as to climax is, and just as sweet. I do suppose it depends on who you’re with, of course.” The tone of his voice made it sound as if he had someone in mind when he made the comment, but I didn’t press him. I took the cigarette from his fingers again. This drag was much easier, and I finally felt like I was getting the hang of it.

“Why are we talking about this, exactly?” I asked him, curious. It wasn’t that I was uncomfortable talking about sex, I had no problem with it, and I wasn’t too surprised by Francis’s easiness with the topic. We’d had a number of conversations about things others would be adverse to having, and this was no different.

“Well, I heard you had a death wish,” he said, casual.

At first, I was lost, unsure of what he meant. I told him, “I haven’t wanted to die in years.” This was true, and I meant it, but he just laughed at me again.

“Use that brain of yours, Richard; I know you can.”

I caught on, and any progress I had made on smoking the cigarette properly vanished. I coughed again, bewildered. “Jesus, Francis.”

“Am I wrong?” he asked. “You’ve really got to be more quiet when you shower. I fear the neighbours may start asking questions. And don’t think I didn’t hear you in the living room.” My whole body felt as if it were burning, my cheeks full of Greek fire; blazing and inextinguishable.

“What?” I asked, nearly breathless.

“You know ‘what’,” he said. “You heard me, too, didn’t you?”

I felt my soul leave me through my agape mouth.

Gracefully, he reached his arms up over his head, stretching. I tried to avert my eyes, keeping my gaze on anything but him, but I caved in and looked. His stomach stretched out the most, his ribs poking underneath the soft, pale skin of his chest. I could see the outline of three of his ribs, the rest hidden underneath his skin and muscles. Following down his torso, his belly was covered in a thin line of hair, the colour as red as the hair on his head, and continued down into his boxers. The underwear was fitted, but still hung just under his hip on one side, the edge of his pelvis bone causing my mind to race. His legs didn’t do too much to ease me, either; he had positioned them in such a way that exposed the inner side of his thighs, a milky white surface that was tantalizing at worst and eager at best. My thoughts were dancing, looking at the skin with a million exhilarating ideas. His legs, according to one thought, were just a blank canvas, my teeth and lips and tongue to soon be the paint and brushes. He groaned, too, the whole noise sensuous and inviting.

I looked back up at him; he was smiling innocently like a child. Once he was satisfied with his calculated movement, he moved on to his stomach, crawling over to me. I stayed where I was, on my side, letting him come to me.

“Well, Richard?” he said. The way he said my name was a breath, one that he had taken from me, as I couldn’t seem to get an even one out. His face was inches from mine. “Is it true you’d like to die?”

For a moment I laid there, unable to speak or even formulate a thought that I could turn into speech. I was overwhelmed by the tension between us, the thrilling knot in my stomach already forming and a twitchy feeling in my thighs growing stronger by the second. When I finally spoke I said a simple, “Yes,” and I let him kill me.

We didn’t break any of the rules in doing this. I got up before him the next morning and put on the coffee, our shoes had not been touched, and our joint experience in the shower had not been uttered about once. (Though, I suppose I did break my own rule of not thinking about a certain happening, but it was Francis’ fault and therefore it did not count). We didn’t talk about the night before either, but we didn’t have to. Through careful gazes over our breakfast and his fingertips brushing mine as he took my plate to the sink and a hand on his shoulder as I left the kitchen, we both knew that we felt the same.

  
  


Too late to be classified as afternoon, but too early to be the evening some days later, I was napping in the living room on the couch.

The sounds of cars passing and dogs barking and neighbours doing what one did during the in between of afternoon and evening flooding through the windows and the walls, and while the light coming through the curtains was a warm yellow, causing the room to glow, I felt as if I were trapped in complete darkness. My head was ablaze with images of large-toothed smiles and fingers too long to be human and bodies as thin as sticks, and I woke up with a start. My forehead was warm, and my legs felt as if they were overheating underneath the blanket, but I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to do in that moment, and I got the childish instinct that something would grab my ankle from under the couch if I put my feet on the floor. The room wasn’t dark though my eyes still insisted in finding the shadow-like creatures from my dream in the dark space underneath the loveseat. It felt as if someone was doing the same against my heart, making it beat faster than I wanted it to. I rubbed over my face and sat up.

I looked up at the loveseat. Francis, laid out over the cushions, had his eyes on me already, curiosity pulled across his face.

I answered the question he had in his head. “I’m all right.”

“Is this where I ask what happened?” he asked me, putting the book in his hands on the table. I shrugged, but stayed silent, and he looked at me closer. “What happened?” he humoured.

“Ah,” I said, struggling to find words that wouldn’t make me sound completely out of my mind. I shuffled sentences around in my head to try and make something coherent, but I just wasn’t having it. I stopped myself from telling him about the hypothetical monster under the couch and the cruel tricks my eyes were playing on me in the dark. “Bad dream,” I said simply.

He nodded, in both understanding and sympathy. I looked at him. His face looked bare, no hint of any usual pretentiousness. “I used to get them a lot,” he told me, “but they’ve toned down over the years. Was it about…” he trailed, not sure how to describe our school year in one simple phrase, but I understood what he was trying to get at. I shook my head.

“It was more,” I said, trying to find my words as I said them, “general, dream-logic absurdity.”

“Hm. I didn’t think you could have a bad dream about anything else,” he quipped, “but I suspect that no dream could be as dreadful as anything that had actually happened.”

We were quiet again after that. Francis fixated his eyes on the carpet. My eyes were fixated on him. I knew he was handsome and I regarded him as such, but the moonlight revealed something else about him. The warm, orange light made him look both delicate and beautiful. His hair stood out against the colour of his skin, though they both seemed to remind me of the sun, his hair fiery red and skin white hot. The beautiful always faced the worst misfortune, I pondered, thinking about everything that had gotten him to this moment, both the good and the bad. The latter disproportionately outweighed the former.

“Richard?” he said finally.

“Hm?”

“Do you… would you like to go lay down?” he asked. “In my room, I mean.”

Sitting up straight, I breathed carefully, trying to formulate an answer.

“It might be more comfortable than the couch,” he added as he noticed my minor bought of nerves take over my expression.

“Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.” I couldn’t quite grasp the reason for my anxiety aside from the dream, but when Francis opened the bedroom door I seemed to understand a little.

This was the first time I was coming into his bedroom since that night.

I felt my face warm.

He went in and I followed after. I wondered if I should close it behind me or if that would be too suggestive. I wondered, right after, why I was so stuck in my head about it – it didn’t matter, he wanted me in here – and closed it anyway. He climbed into his bed on one side over the covers and sat on his side with his shoulder against the headboard. I sat next to him, opting to stay over the covers as well. I sat directly against the headboard, my knees drawn up lazily and my hands holding my ankles. His hands played with the hem of a blanket, a smaller, pale blue one lying over his duvet, as if he were giving them something to do.

“Francis,” I said suddenly. “Do you ever feel tired?”

He looked at me, his mouth quirked up. “Have you met me?” he laughed.

I smiled, too, then said, “I mean, do you ever wish everything could just stop for a day? No responsibilities, no work, no stressing, nothing.”

He considered his words for a long while, and for a minute I thought he was going to ignore my question and say nothing at all. Finally, he said, “Yes. I thought it especially at school.”

“Did you?” 

“Yes. I had always been hoping for one day where Henry wouldn’t bring up murder or bacchanals or whatever sick thought he’d had in his head that week. Not to mention schoolwork. I was smart but I still fell behind.” He paused delicately. “Even now, I feel it. I never thought I’d have to worry about paying my rent.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “I think about it and it feels like it’d be a break from living.”

“Now, wouldn’t that be nice,” he said. He looked down again, and it took me a moment to realize he had closed them.

After a while, I saw his eyes open again in the glow of the sunlight, wide and tired. His gaze met mine. His eyelids fell and rose again slowly, and I could see the drowsiness that came from the 4 o’clock sun in his expression. Our eyes stayed locked like that for a minute or two, mine staring easily, though with intent, into his. The phrase “the eyes are the window to the soul” seemed so true in that moment, for I felt that, since beginning to stay with him, I had yet to reconnect with him at a level even similar to that in school.

I was almost there, I thought.

“Francis?” I said without knowing what I wanted to say next. I looked at his mouth and he noticed. He licked his lips, wetting them, and they remained parted. I watched him look down at my mouth, then back up to my eyes. I looked at him intently, asking silently for permission to do what I was thinking about doing. He looked back in understanding.

“Yes,” he said.

And then I kissed him.

It just seemed _right_.

This kiss was different from the other one – the very first one, some odd years ago.

The first one had been made of desire, crafted completely out of passion and lust and need. We had both been taken over by the desperation to get our lips on each other, whether it be the other’s lips or neck or jaw and I have no doubt we would have gone farther than kissing if we hadn’t been interrupted by Charles while in the heat of it all.

You may expect me to say that this one was soft and smooth and easy – a thing of clouds and rosy cheeks. That I was soothed by the feeling of his mouth against me, warm and sweet and familiar as an apple pie. That this one was made of pure want. I _wanted_ to kiss him, as he _wanted_ to kiss me, and so we did.

But that’s all it was really; a kiss.

Yes, I was completely overwhelmed by the feeling of his lips against mine, and it felt good, and his lips were, in fact, soft. My lips remembered his like kissing him had been a habit, and I did hope it would become one. The process, however, was quite straightforward: we were kissing, and then we weren’t. It was more than a peck, and I did find that my mouth fit nicely against his, but perhaps I was thinking that because I was enjoying the fact that I was kissing him. I placed a hand on his shoulder to steady myself, keeping myself from falling onto him, and my lips were on his for no more than a few seconds. The idea of a first (second, in our case) kiss was so idealized, so romanticized, so built up to be this magical experience with fireworks and passion and cheering from the crowd around you, and I was all one for romanticization. It was shaped into this idea of perfection when it was anything but. First (second) kisses were not perfect. Love was not perfect. Love was the most imperfect thing in the world.

First (second) kisses were messy and inexperienced and unpredictable and anxiety-filled. They were complicated and innocent and confusing. They were ordinary. This one was no different.

Anyhow, I preferred the kiss that followed.

We broke apart but stayed mere inches from each other, the tip of my nose touching his. His hands were still at his sides and mine on his shoulder, but he reached up with one and placed it on my elbow. My eyes were still half-closed from the kiss, but his were open wide. Despite this, I couldn’t read what he was thinking.

“Richard,” he said quietly, and I opened my eyes fully. He blinked, slowly, and I could see him thinking of what to say next but he was quiet.

I spoke for him. “That was nice,” I said. He smiled in amusement.

“You would say that,” he teased.

“It was, though.”

“You’re right,” he said, “it was.”

We were both quiet then, unsure as to where we were going with this until asked me, confidently, “Can I kiss you again?” and I let him.

I was _his_.

After what were a glorious few minutes of catching up on kisses that we’d missed over the past few years, he asked, “I’ll get started on dinner, then?”

“Mhm,” I said, eyes still on his kiss-stained lips.

He must have noticed, as he smiled at me affectionately. “I’ll come get you when it’s ready,” he said, and left. For a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me again. He didn’t, but I didn’t mind all that much; I knew there were many more to come.

  
  


We did many things in that apartment of his.

We frequented the bookstore he’d brought me to when I’d just arrived in New York, buying a new novel every so often to keep ourselves occupied. We got a variety of genres – classics we’d both read at least three times over, novellas by local authors, books chosen simply by the image on the cover. Not all of them were great, some were good enough to have us staying up late to finish. He’d read while in the bath and at the kitchen table while I made us dinner, and I’d read while in bed before we went to sleep and lying on the couch with my head in his lap, his fingers combing through my hair.

I started to take up cooking for the nights when we didn’t want to go out or order in, and it turned into a sort of personal therapy. Francis, of course, was happy to taste anything I made, sitting at the table or on the counter or simply standing behind me and watching me cook.

“What do you think of this?” I asked, offering a bit of marinara to his mouth.

He took it and licked his lips, letting the flavour settle over his taste buds. His eyes lit up. “Mm,” he said, “I like that.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.” His arms settled around my waist, his chin on my shoulder. “You’re getting good at this.”

We went out quite a bit. We got home one night, late, and had barely closed the door before we had our lips on each other. We’d both had a bit to drink and he’d had the audacity to have his hand on my thigh while we were on our way back. He knew what he was doing, and I knew he knew what he was doing, and he knew I knew he knew what he was doing, and when I looked at him our eyes met and he smiled innocently, giving my leg a light squeeze. I looked away, my cheeks burning cherry red, but spread my knees farther apart just enough for him to notice.

“Francis, the door–” I mumbled against him, pulling away long enough to lock the door. He leaned down again and went for my neck and under my jaw, pulling my jacket off my shoulders and letting it drop to the floor. We both fumbled with our shoes, trying desperately to keep our lips on each other in the process of getting them off but failing and laughing into each other instead. When we were finished with the battle with our oxfords, he kissed me, soft, and smiled against my mouth. With my hands on his waist I kissed him back with the same softness. His lips were warm and tasted of red wine and sugar.

Kissing him was a heroin addiction.

He pulled me by the collar of my shirt to the bedroom (a door we didn’t bother closing at all, as we were much too preoccupied). He guided me down onto the bed more politely than I expected and kissed at my neck while I unbuttoned my shirt and my pants. I was quick, after discarding my clothes, to turn it around and get him to lie on the bed, where he stayed the rest of the night.

He joined me in the shower sometimes. It was never in the morning as he continued to think that I woke up much too early to shower even if it was already nine o’clock, but on the odd day when I would take one at night, after a long day or what have you, he would slip in as I undressed and we would stand together under the water, as hot as I could get it when you shared a building with who knows how many tenants.

Eventually we invested in a small radio, and we both found that our moods began to go up as days in a music-filled home passed. While I enjoyed the silence and the sounds of passing cars and rattling dishes and Francis’s breathing (something I had quickly become accustomed to after moving in), coming back to the apartment to the sounds of someone singing made me happier each time it happened. The dial was permanently set to a ‘50s station (a choice made by Francis) and on nights when we opted to turn off the lights and light his candles instead, we’d push the coffee table out of the way and we’d dance. It wasn’t anything fancy, just the two of us bumbling around the living room, moving together offbeat and having a bit too much fun. During the slower songs, he taught me how to waltz.

“I had lessons when I was younger,” he told me, placing a hand on my waist. I put mine on his arm, and he took my other hand in his. This sort of contact wasn’t at all foreign to us; we always found one excuse or another to have our hands on each other – a hand on a back in passing, pushing away a stray hair, a head on a shoulder while we lazed on the couch, and, when we felt very comfortable, a hand on a knee while in the taxi on the way back to the apartment (this one we didn’t do often for safety’s sake, and one of the only times we had been able to get away with it was during a ride back after a particularly early yet tiring night after we had gone out to dinner, during which our rather talkative driver accidently let slip something about his boyfriend and, in an attempt to let him know that it was all right, _we’re the same_ , Francis placed a hand on my knee and offered him a kind smile). We’d never tried to dance properly like this, and at first it was very stiff. I was confused, though Francis seemed to know what he was doing. I tried my best to follow along, letting him lead me around. I stepped where he told me to, and I attempted to stay in rhythm, but the latter was much harder for me. Eventually my arms grew tired, and I let them drop a little.

“Honestly, Richard, your form is awful,” Francis complained, his lips curled into a smile. “C’mon, elbows up.”

“They’re _aching_ , dear,” I told him.

“Then you’re doing it wrong,” he opposed. “You can’t have two left feet and bad posture.”

“I do not have two left feet.”

He kissed next to my eye sweetly. “You’re hardly keeping in time, darling. Just do what I do.”

I followed his lead, listening to the “one, two, three; one, two, three,” that he muttered under his breath. He kept his eyes on our feet and my arms to keep us in time and make sure I was following correctly, but I couldn’t keep mine off his face.

His expression was concentrated – his eyebrows were crushed up and his mouth was open slightly – but he was relaxed, and I fell into a daze looking at how his eyelashes fell over his cheeks. I misstepped, taking his toes underneath my foot.

“Richard!” he exclaimed. He kept his hands on me.

“Sorry!” We fell out of rhythm but we continued to dance despite.

“You’re not even following properly,” he laughed, dragging me around the room.

“I am!” I insisted, smiling wider than I had in months.

He leaned closer, his nose almost pressing against mine. “Are not.” We waddled around together, messily, much too clumsily to even be classified as a waltz. I suspect we would look quite silly to an outside eye; badly waltzing around in a messy living room, the both of us in our pyjamas and socks, much too tired and giggly and awkward to care about doing it properly anymore.

Eventually, we just held each other. My arms moved to his shoulders and around his neck and he wrapped his around my waist and we stood in the warm, loveful, candle-lit room and swayed together. I laid my head on his shoulder and my nose pressed against his neck and I took him in. I felt his lips graze over the shell of my ear, and he kissed me just behind it. In that moment I thought to myself, _I know him and he knows me and we still choose to love each other_ , and for the first time in my life I didn’t feel lonely. No internal, deep-rooted loneliness that creeps up and sits on your shoulder everyday even when you’re surrounded by people you love. No lost, isolated feeling that lays next to you while you sleep. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel lonely, and it was all because of him.

I pulled him closer to me, more a hug than simply a hold.

“Richard,” he said, softer than he ever had before. 

Jo Stafford’s voice floated through the speakers, and I lifted my head. My forehead touched his and he smiled at me carefully before leaning down and pressing his lips to mine. They were soft, and felt like home. I knew those lips like I did my own voice, I knew them like I knew when a pot of tea was steeped just long enough to be perfect, I knew them like I knew the cycle of day and night, continuous and familiar. When we broke I looked at him and he looked at me and even though we didn’t say it out loud we told each other we loved one another. My feelings for him were deafening and I often found myself unable to think of anything other than him. This, of course, was one of those moments; everything around us faded into the background, and all I could see was Francis, _my_ Francis, my smart, dramatic, elegant, affectionate, darling Francis Abernathy.

I held him close to me, my head near his heart, and we stayed like that, pressed together as if the world was coming to an end.

  
  


I woke up one morning to clattering from the other room. The sun came in through the windows, giving our curtains no use. I looked around for the clock to see the time, but I couldn’t find it. I sat up, finding that the blanket had fallen to the floor some time in the night. I felt another absence in the obvious lack of external body heat I had fallen asleep with the night before. My back wasn’t as sore as I expected sleeping on the couch to make it, though. Peering in the kitchen, I saw Francis at the stove. He turned when he heard me come in.

“Good morning,” he said, his smile tired and bright.

“Good morning,” I said, and kissed him. I put a hand on his back to peer over his shoulder, peeking at what he was making. “Looks good.”

“I try,” he teased. I kissed his shoulder. “Go sit,” he said, “it’s almost done.”

I kissed him once more, this time behind his ear, and I heard him smile. Sitting at the dining table I looked at him softly, and as I usually did I began to think. 

Falling for Francis had been many things. It was fast and hard and jarring but it had been soft and gradual and warm. It was comfortable, and it was safe. It was exhilarating, and it was numbing, and it was fun, and I knew he felt the same way – as individuals we were both quite unusual men, and together we were simply a pair of unusual men, but the most important thing was that we knew it and we embraced it and we loved each other more because of it. It felt like the opposite of displeasure, and while one may argue that the opposite of “displeasure” is simply “pleasure,” I find that the former gives off a much stronger feeling than that of the latter. “Pleasure” insinuates that something was good and comfortable but does not give a hint to any sort of high feeling one may get while experiencing the opposite feeling of displeasure, which is what I had been doing. I do find the English language to be quite peculiar.

With anything he did, I was reminded of how much I loved him all over again.

I could start this one at any of the hundreds of points of our relationship, any of the thousands of moments in time I’ve spent with him. I could start at the train station, or the hospital, or his apartment, my room, the hall where we first met. And it’s hard, really, to choose where to start because each of these moments have a place in how we’ve grown with each other. I met him in that hallway and it was the first time I spoke to the man who would unexpectedly change the course of my life forever. I kissed him in my room and while enjoyable albeit shocking and short-lived, it was the first time that I started to consider if I liked men or not and it was the first time that I started to consider if I liked him as more than a friend (even if I did deny it to both him and myself for as long as I could). I spent countless hours in his apartment for many reasons – to leave mine, to hide out from the others, to simply spend time with him because I wanted to – and it was in that apartment that I really started to consider us to be close, properly _close_ friends. I came to him in the hospital and while it wasn’t the first time I had been concerned for his well being (because if you were friends with Francis, you were concerned for his well being at least four times a week), it was the first time I was properly scared for his life. I didn’t want to lose him, and getting his letter had worried me more than I had ever worried about him before. I went to the train station with him and Camilla and although we had all been sad that our trip was coming to an end, I had realized as I watched Camilla leave that I had, at least a little, reconnected with them, and I’m unsure now if that reconnection would’ve been what stopped me from getting where I am now.

Where I am now. In New York, with Francis. I could always start there.

I could start in our messy, coffee-and-tobacco-scented, New York apartment with loud neighbours and subpar water pressure. I could start where we sat and laid and napped and read together, and where we held each other when the lights were dimmed and the radio was on, and where we watched mediocre television and interior design shows just to poke fun at the designers choices in wallpaper. I could start where we ate, and where we talked and laughed and dined, and where I learned that food was, without a doubt, a language of love. I could start where we began and ended our days, where we cleaned up and got ready for frequent outings, and where we were sometimes at our most intimate. I could start where we slept, under a duvet and an additional two throw blankets because one of us was always too cold (hint: it was not me), where I held him when his emotions got the better of him, where slow, warm tears ran down onto my shoulder, where we were always at our most intimate, where we held hands before dozing off, and where I got to open my eyes every morning to the most handsome and gentle man I have and will ever meet.

I could begin this one anywhere I wanted to.

I could, of course, start here – where I had fallen in love.

**Author's Note:**

> richard: are you flirting with me?  
> francis: i have been for the past few weeks but thanks for noticing
> 
> (ps i have about 700 words about what richard got up to That Night. if yall want it i will deliver)
> 
> tumblr:  
> etherealparrish (main)  
> ohmyhoneybun (mlm/lovecore)  
> historicalsgnificance (dark academia)  
> adrientheodorepercival (writeblr)


End file.
